


The Most Poetical Thing

by silversmith



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: London Underground, Maps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:15:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silversmith/pseuds/silversmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock loves the Underground. Other things are a bit more complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Most Poetical Thing

_“The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”_

_“So it is," said Mr. Syme… “Take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a timetable, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say! …Every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos.”_

G. K. Chesterton, _The Man Who Was Thursday_

-

When he is young, Sherlock’s favourite diagram is the Periodic Table. If people get too loud or confusing or close, he retires to a corner and sits cross-legged, running his fingers along the rows and columns, murmuring atomic numbers to himself in a soft chant. The Periodic Table is reassuring. It means that everything is logical, if you go down deep enough. He thinks about taking people apart, sorting them into their elements, and dropping their gently spinning atoms into the right boxes. It makes things easier.

-

During the summer holidays, Mycroft brings him to an exhibition of diagrams. Mycroft reads a book and looks superior while Sherlock stands in front of the diagrams with an aspect of veneration, drinking them in. 

“What does _Strom der Zeiten_ mean?” he asks, though he knows what Mycroft will say.

“Look it up when we get home. You’ll remember it that way.”

Sherlock moans, because Mycroft is _annoying_ when he’s like this, but then, he did bring Sherlock to the exhibition, which is the best thing for a long time. 

“They’re a stupid thing to like, anyway,” says Mycroft, who’s had a supercilious air ever since he went away to school.

“They put things in order,” explains Sherlock, gazing longingly at a chart of the world’s highest mountains.

“They're just lies,” says Mycroft. “You can’t put everything in order like that. The world is too complicated.”

Sherlock snorts, because Mycroft is rubbish and no help at all. “Give me a pen,” he says. “I want to write this one down.” 

This diagram is about history. It’s in the shape of a Greek temple and it has rows and columns of famous people in different colours. It looks much more logical than the kind of history he’s usually taught, which is all about Egyptians and seems pointless to Sherlock (though he does like the embalming, and is disappointed with the results when he tries to mummify a pigeon with whisky. He is still trying to lay his hands on some formaldehyde.)

“We’re going to be late for Mummy,” says Mycroft, and tugs Sherlock away. Sherlock shrieks and bites him, partly because the thought of leaving the charts makes him feel sick, and partly out of habit. Mycroft ignores him.

Later, Sherlock finds that he can remember the diagram quite easily by pretending that he’s standing in the middle of the temple. He goes to find the big encyclopedias, and looks up the best names: Tancred, Zenobia, Coligny, Duns Scotus. Their lives are mostly illogical, but at least he knows where they fit.

-

Everything is confusing, but diagrams can make it better. Sherlock lies on the lawn and sees too many things: a hundred thousand blades of grass, all slightly different; trees sketched out in innumerable crooked lines; a beetle that crawls round and round in random meaningless patterns that seem to be burnt on the backs of his eyeballs. It makes him feel like he’s going to explode: there is too much of everything, all inside his head, and why, why is it all like _this_? He feels wildly unhappy, so he drums his hands and feet against the ground and screams to drown it out.

When he is tired of this, he goes to his room (reassuringly sparse and quiet). He makes a map of the garden so that he can look at it instead of the real thing, and in place of all the squiggles and mess, he draws everything as neat lines and squares.

“You can’t _do_ that, Sherlock,” says Mycroft impatiently.

-

Mycroft is wrong. Sherlock realises this when he finds the Tube map, because the Tube map is order, but it’s also true. It’s even more true than the real map; it shows the purpose underneath, the whole point of the railway. The awful messy surfaces are just a distraction from the Underground’s elegant logic.

He loves the Tube map. The coy little dip of the Central line; the steady, sturdy sweep of the Northern; District and Circle holding tight to each other as they rush dizzily around the City; that painfully blue right angle in Victoria, elbowing out into surprising empty space. He traces his finger around them over and over. _Kilburn Park, Maida Vale, Warwick Avenue, Paddington._

He could make a Tube map of life. _Insurance Fraud, Infidelity, Absent Father, Murder._ People’s lives are messy, but under the surface, they always run on tracks. If he could map their connections, perhaps life would be more like a diagram, and less like someone shouting constantly in his ear. He begins to watch people, to work out their lines.

-

 _Points!_ He knows the points as soon as he looks at the plan in Mycroft’s file. He knows London’s railways so well, from gazing dreamily at maps and from years spent riding on the trains. He remembers feeling these points shudder and click beneath him, logging them into his mind with every curve and lilt of the tracks. He remembers that he was sitting on the left-hand side of the carriage by the window and it was raining and there was a man opposite him wearing a grey suit who had just been fired from his banking job and was about to drink two bottles of red wine and throw up, and across the aisle from him there was a student teacher from Swindon visiting a school friend she had never really liked. He slotted the picture and the points into his map, in case he ever needed them.

Mycroft is clever. He knows that Sherlock can’t resist the railway. Sherlock sends John, because Mycroft needs to know that he can’t be so easily manipulated now ( _give him a train map, make him shut up_ ). And it just goes to show that Sherlock is cleverer than Mycroft thinks, because he doesn’t even have to look at the track to know why West ended up right there. He can lie here on his sofa in a nicotine haze and work it all out. He already knows the lines.

-

Sometimes, when Sherlock gets fed up with people, he tunes the radio to white noise and draws a better Tube map. 

Some of his maps are disciplined and tightly knitted, like a Bach piece. His best uses space 23% more efficiently than TfL’s. It fits together like a skeleton, the tiny bird-bones of London. He puts it on his website.

Sometimes, he thinks about commuters (because God knows they’re not going to think for themselves) and tries to nudge them into taking the most efficient routes. He pays some confused _Big Issue_ sellers to travel across the city with his improved map, and gets them to fill in questionnaires. Then he gets bored with their idiotic ramblings that mess up his lines, and draws a map just for himself. He draws it delicate and almost sweet. It sounds like pale blue-green, like pouring fine-grained sugar. Sherlock hums the names to himself, running his fingertips along the lines: _Angel, Old Street, Moorgate, Bank._

(“Playing Mornington Crescent?” says John.)

Variations on a theme. Point and counterpoint. The Tube lines are a polyphonic liturgy; he draws them like they sound. Some things can be twitched: he moves the Metropolitan down until it feels right, and curls the sullen Picc and Vic together. He tugs Queensway to a more satisfactory spot, and moves White City fractions of a millimetre back and forth until his eyes are sore.

He knows not to meddle too much, though. Some things are immutable. 

Circle is the heart of the map.

-

Sherlock would know where he is on the Tube by the sound and the smell and the feel of the tracks. _Cannon Street, Mansion House, Blackfriars, Temple._ He likes to ride it with his eyes closed, and watch himself pulse around the beautiful lines: beat in a vein, spark in a circuit board. He is inside the map. He is composing some variations on the tracks to the east of South Kensington.

He hopes that, some day, he will be knocked out and put on a Tube train to wake up, blindfolded and wearing noise-cancelling headphones, so that he can see how long it takes him to work out where he is. He considers asking John to arrange this for him, but he thinks that John would almost certainly refuse.

-

The smuggler’s crucial mistake is to dart down into a Tube station. Sherlock stops running immediately and rubs his hands together with glee.

John wheels round, aghast. “What are you doing? If he gets on a train we’ve lost him!”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Sherlock, he could go anywhere in London!”

“Yes, but he won’t. Think about it.”

“What?”

“All the lines are the same to him right now. He just needs to pick one to get away. So we simply have to deduce which one he’ll choose.” Sherlock brings up his mental map of Paddington. “He runs down these stairs. What does he do when he reaches the ticket hall? He’s left-handed, so he favours his left, which means he heads towards the Bakerloo platforms. Down the escalator, and now he has a choice of two platforms. The down escalator is on the right, so he naturally turns towards the closest platform. That means he gets on a southbound train.

“Now what? He’s panicking, worried someone is following. He needs to change trains. First interchange is Baker Street. He gets off. There’s a cross-platform change right there, so he runs to the first train he sees: Jubilee southbound. Now he’s a bit calmer. But what’s his next move? He’s lost in an unfamiliar city and he can’t use his phone underground. He needs to get off the Tube. 

“He looks at the list of stops; they’re just names to him. But what’s this? Green Park, change for Victoria line. Now, he flew into Gatwick, so he got the Gatwick Express; he’s been in Victoria Station before. If he heads there he’ll be in familiar territory. And by now he’s lost, he’s desperate for reassurance. He thinks that'll give him an advantage. He changes at Green Park to get to Victoria. The whole journey takes him fourteen minutes, if he makes good connections. With any luck we can be there in ten.”

He’s already flagging down a taxi, pulling out his mobile to text Lestrade. They collar the smuggler at the Victoria ticket barrier.

John is shaking his head. “I have no idea how the hell you do that.”

(John doesn’t understand. He doesn’t realise that the Underground is a world of pure logic. People think differently down there.)

“Hardly impressive,” says Sherlock, turning away. “It’s child’s play to predict what someone will do if you know the only map he’s got.”

-

Sherlock knows all the Tube maps: the hapless, spidery sprawl of the early years; then the transfiguration: Harry Beck’s genius, imposing order (how he’d like to meet that man!); the crisp, clean lines, stretching and evolving, layers upon layers, lifetimes of London under his fingertips.

But his tastes are catholic: he has transit maps from all over the world. None of them compare to London, though. Paris is too honeycombed; Berlin two-dimensional. Madrid is too square, Seoul too aggressive, Tokyo too busy. Moscow is intriguing. They’ve never quite got New York right.

Sometimes he improves them, but it’s only an intellectual exercise. London he loves. He rolls the station names around his mouth and feels the carriage shift and grumble as he draws. _Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross, Embankment, Waterloo._ He sees the escalators at Angel, the pillars at Westminster, the lovely oxblood tiles of Leslie Green. Every white dot is a riot of data, pinned firmly into place and made secure.

He has spent all day fixing the Delhi metro map. 

“All right,” says John, and nods, smiling gently. “You want something from the Indian, then?”

-

“I put my CV online,” says their client, “and I got this weird anonymous job offer. They want me to go to some random house at midnight, and dictate Wikipedia articles into a voice recorder. It’s good money, too. Do you think there’s something off about it? I mean, why can’t I do it during the day?”

Sherlock stretches out on the sofa and groans. He is thinking about deducing the patterns on the Tube train seat cushions. Somebody must have designed them, which means they must have a meaning. Are the circles meant to be the London Eye? Surely they can’t just be random. Not on the Underground.

“It does sound a bit odd, yeah,” says John, taking notes. He glares at Sherlock. “What’s the address?”

“23 Leinster Gardens.”

“Ha!” says Sherlock, sitting up suddenly. “That’s an old one. Whoever wants to get into your flat has some class, at least.”

Lestrade in tow, they stake out the client’s flat at midnight, and apprehend the burglar climbing in through the window.

“Go on then,” says John, afterwards. “You’re dying to explain how you knew it was a decoy.”

“Oh, easy,” says Sherlock, and they walk to Leinster Gardens. “Notice anything odd about numbers 23 and 24?”

John squints. “The windows – aren’t real windows. They’re painted on. And there’s no letterbox. It’s a dummy house. But why?”

“It’s a façade,” says Sherlock. “The rest of the houses are perfectly real, but these two were demolished a long time ago. The Underground, John! When they cut the line between Paddington and Bayswater, it went right through this row of houses. They knocked down numbers 23 and 24 while they were building, and put up a brick wall so no one would see the railway.”

They walk round to the back of the houses and look down at the Tube trains, rushing below.

“So they just left a hole between the houses? Why didn’t they build over it again?”

“The trains still ran on steam when the Underground was built. They had to leave gaps to vent it out of the tunnels, or they would fill up with smoke.”

“That’s amazing,” says John. “How can you know all this stuff, and nothing about the solar system?”

“I remember important things,” says Sherlock. “It’s hardly my fault if nobody else realises what’s important.”

“Amazing.”

-

Cut and cover, cut and cover. Put up a wall to hide the gaps. Sherlock feels like the District line: tentacles all over London, but no real heart.

(Lestrade is solid, H&C. Mycroft is Jubilee: insinuating, dull.)

John is Circle. But his eyes are the colour of the Docklands Light Railway.

-

They don’t often take the Tube together. Sherlock doesn’t like to use it on cases; he can’t think on the Tube like he can in taxis. Underground, he’s in a different city. The Tube is for relaxing, for being soothed by the clattering sway, swaddled gently within the arms of the map. _Barbican, Farringdon, King’s Cross St Pancras, Euston Square._

John doesn’t like the Tube. Sherlock’s noticed that. He doesn’t say anything, but he goes very still and quiet and his breathing becomes too regular, like he’s counting breaths, and he stares very intently at the floor. Sherlock doesn’t ask why, but he starts to avoid the Tube when John’s with him.

-

Sherlock finds an animation online: the Tube map writhes into the geographic map, then smooths itself back again. He watches it for hours. 

He knows all the staff at the Baker Street station. (He possesses several of their ID cards and an orange uniform jacket.) He’s spent hours in their control room, hunched over CCTV footage, ready to pounce. When he wanders through the station with a harpoon, covered in pig’s blood, the station manager just laughs and waves a friendly hand at him. 

Once, after he’d traced some human traffickers to the disused King William Street station, they’d shown him around the Network Operations Centre and let him see their computer system: blocky yellow stations, numbered train-boxes moving across the black screens, nothing left to chance. He loves the people who work on the Underground; they keep the blood moving around the city’s veins.

 _Lancaster Gate, Marble Arch, Bond Street, Oxford Circus._ When he walks across London, he can feel the lines underneath his feet.

-

“You went on the Tube like that?”

John knows when he’s been on the trains. He recognises the dreamy, unfocused look in Sherlock’s eyes. Sherlock could stay on the Underground all day, feeling everything, the whole of life neatly compressed and packed into a tin with him and sent shuttling around a beautiful, impossible map. It was hard to get off at Baker Street.

When the trains are full, he feels delirious with all the people around him, all tired and hungry and hopeful and heartbroken, and he watches them and knows them all. He watches the little games people play on the Tube, the threads of disapproval in their glances, the subtle jockeying for position when a seat comes free. Black tunnels and white tiles and roundels. Everything down here is wonderful. 

When the Tube is empty, it is almost painfully peaceful, and sometimes he is rocked into a trance by its rattle and howl and doesn’t come home until the manager at the end station has firmly escorted him off the last train of the night and bundled him into a cab back to Baker Street. The next day, John makes him ring up and apologise for the inconvenience. Sherlock finds this absurd.

-

They need to time the journey from a Notting Hill flat to Liverpool Street Station; an alibi depends on it. It’s the middle of the summer, and Sherlock estimates the temperature in the carriage at thirty-eight degrees. They’re crushed in a press of sticky tourists and angry Londoners, and ordinarily Sherlock would be thinking about all the people around him, assessing their levels of cleanliness, deciding what he’ll have to disinfect later, but right now he is preoccupied with the effect they seem to be having on John, because John is gasping and shaking and he looks like he might pass out.

“John?” says Sherlock.

“Aha,” says John, and retches, and claps his hand over his mouth.

“We’ll be at Holborn in twenty seconds,” says Sherlock. “If you want to get off.”

John shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he manages. 

Sherlock liberates a water bottle from the rucksack of a nearby German tourist, and passes it to John. John gulps at it and clutches the pole grimly. Sherlock is not sure what else to do. He decides on distraction, and begins to talk. He tells John that the journey between Leicester Square and Covent Garden takes only twenty seconds, and that travelling it on a single ticket is more expensive per mile than riding the Orient Express, but that it’s quicker to walk, anyway, because there are 193 stairs at Covent Garden station, which equates to climbing over halfway up the Statue of Liberty. He tells him that only 45% of the Underground is actually underground, and that the Tube employs a hawk to keep pigeons out of its depots. When they finally emerge into the sunshine of Bishopsgate, he checks his watch and tells John that their client is almost certainly innocent.

“Good,” says John. “That’s good. Listen. I’m sorry about that. The Tube. It’s the whole – the crowded spaces. The heat. It brings me back to – there was a bomb, once. We were trapped underneath – anyway. I’m sorry.”

Sherlock nods. “It’s perfectly logical,” he says, and then, because John is still looking unhappy, he adds that the German tourist has a penchant for wearing his girlfriend’s clothes when she’s not around, which makes John choke with laughter and say, “no, really, Sherlock, you’re ridiculous.”

“Didn’t you see his ankles?”

John giggles again. “Thanks, Sherlock,” he says, and gives him a weak smile.

-

He thinks about running a John line through his map. It begins at _Stamford_ , the most tedious, inconsequential of outer zone stations, and gradually snakes itself alongside all of his other tracks. In fact, it seems to be taking over the entire page. He frowns at John, who is looking amused.

“What are you doing?”

“I thought I could make a line for you,” says Sherlock. “But you intersect with almost everything, so it couldn’t possibly work. There’d be no point to the other lines. You’re completely ruining the balance of the whole system.”

“OK,” says John, and laughs to himself.

-

“Move right down inside the cars, please, use all available doors. Ladies and gentlemen, this train is about to depart. Stand clear of the closing doors, please, stand clear of the doors.”

If the Underground network were to be sealed off during rush hour, the people stuck in the system would become, by population, the fourth largest city in the UK. It would not be a very nice city, of course. People would shortly become hysterical and then the water would run out. Sherlock wonders how many murders there would be in the first twenty-four hours.

-

They ruined Green Park in 2001. Why? The extension of Jubilee changed things, he knew that, but why did they need to throw the line off the Green Park junction? It makes his head hurt. And then some lunatic in 2002 got his hands on the tick at Gloucester Road. Sherlock has hardly been able to look at it since. He’s emailed TfL about it, several times. They’ve stopped acknowledging his messages. How do ordinary people cope with such rubbish on their maps? 

There’s so much mess everywhere. 

-

John went into the tunnel. John went in with a torch eight minutes ago, and he hasn’t come out again, which means that he’s still in there, and this is a problem. Lines of thought are curling around Sherlock, telling him that the gang are well on their way to Hammersmith and there’s no guarantee that Lestrade’s team are going to make it in time to catch them, but the thick rope of tracks straight ahead of him is going _John, John, John_ and he can’t do anything but follow it. 

“John?” His voice is unsteady, and it echoes off the tunnel walls. He runs blind, feet slipping on the ballast, torch focused on the rails and sleepers in the distance. There is no sign of John.

For the first time in his life, Sherlock wishes he didn’t know the trains so well.

Then there’s a movement. He can see a dark and crumpled heap shifting on the tracks ahead, and Sherlock runs like he’s never run before. _John, John, John!_ He skids to a halt and grabs John’s arm and pulls him to his feet. John staggers.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m – I’m fine.”

“Good,” says Sherlock, and shoves him into the wall of the tunnel and covers him with his body as a train comes roaring past. For a long moment everything is hot wind and roaring and the smell of oil and metal and John, and then there is a reeling silence.

“Nineteen twelve from Victoria,” says Sherlock weakly, into John’s hair. “Luckily, it’s running a two minute delay.”

“Luckily,” says John, and gives a high little laugh. 

They stumble away from the wall. John is limping, and he leans on Sherlock’s arm as they make their way back up the tunnel.

“No other trains I should know about, are there?”

“Not for seven minutes,” says Sherlock. “What _happened_?”

“Rooney came back. We had a bit of a disagreement. He clobbered me on the head and I think I sprained my ankle going down.”

They emerge into a molten sunset, and pick their way towards the train station.

“You should have shot him.”

“In a tunnel? And I don’t just go around shooting people, Sherlock. Not if there’s another option. Anyway,” and he opens his fist to reveal what he has been holding, “I wanted to get close to him.”

“You pickpocketed his mobile,” says Sherlock, astonished. “While he was knocking you out.”

“Thought it might be useful for Lestrade. And the last bit was a miscalculation. Didn’t expect him to be so fast.”

Sherlock gives him a leg-up onto the platform, then swings himself up beside him. They sit there for a minute, just breathing, and Sherlock thinks that he has never felt so peaceful and alive and glad. He looks down John beside him. John is swinging his feet over the side of the platform, and gazing up at the blazing sky. He seems to be quite happy.

“Don’t get lost again,” says Sherlock shortly. “Your absence impairs my cognitive function.”

“It impairs your – Sherlock, you make it sound like I’m _cod liver oil_.”

He sounds indignant, but he is grinning up at Sherlock, and soon they are lying back on the platform, gasping with laughter, much to the bemusement of the commuters nearby.

-

He wonders if he could write John like a Tube map. _Jumpers_ and _Tea_ and _Toast_ , and _Toast_ would be an interchange with _The way his hair is fluffy in the morning_ , which comes from _The way he tosses and turns in the night_ , and that’s an easy line (through _Limp_ , now closed) from _Afghanistan_ , which branches into one track that goes _Courage_ , _Danger_ , _Gun_ , and another that goes _Doctor, Gentle, Cares_ , and _Cares_ , of course, is an intersection back with _Tea_ , and also with _The way he looks when people are hurt_ , and _The way he looks at Sherlock_.

-

He knew that there were points on the line, but he went down anyway. He wanted to see the tracks. Or was it the tracks? He remembers watching the back of John’s head, the sudden lift as John put two and two together, and he could almost picture John’s puzzled frown. He remembers how John leaped up, a question in his eyes, and Sherlock was, for a surprising flash of a second, so proud, because he saw that John had got it.

-

Mycroft, he realises, was right after all. There’s always something that you can’t account for, no matter how rigorously you’ve worked out your first principles; always something that defies the logic of your chart. Hydrogen and helium don’t really fit. The Northern line twines round and round itself, and Mornington Crescent is on the wrong side of the tracks. John has twined himself round and round Sherlock, and, for some reason, Sherlock doesn’t mind. He doesn’t think he has a diagram to make sense of that.

And he doesn’t want to make John into a map, either. John is glorious and lovely, he is like the city, the whole city, and Sherlock does not want him to be cut back and pinned down, he wants every crease and fold of John’s brain, to learn it all by heart, like a satellite picture of London, to see every street, zooming in and out, every crack on the pavement, every dip of the river. John is messy and fascinating and beautiful and Sherlock does not want to smooth him out. John has old and new districts and twisty streets and comfortable parks, and places you wouldn’t want to get lost in after dark. John is full of contradictions. Why would anyone want to reduce him to logic? He is surprising and unexpected and wonderful, and Sherlock wants to trace his thoughts exactly as they are.

-

Lines and points, lines and points. John’s face is a map he knows by heart.

He reaches out to touch it.

**Author's Note:**

> http://www.fourthway.co.uk/realunderground/real_underground_medium_863x604.html  
> http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/images/Willard1846-temple.jpg


End file.
